SAO-based core technological components' identification

Technologies play an important role in the survival and development of enterprises. Understanding and monitoring the core technological components (e.g., technology process, operation method, function) of a technology is an important issue for researchers to develop R&D policy and manage product competitiveness. However, it is difficult to identify core technological components from a mass of terms, and we may experience some difficulties with describing complete technical details and understanding the terms-based results. This paper proposes a Subject-Action-Object (SAO)-based method, in which (1) SAO structures are extracted from patents for describing the function, relationship and operation in specified topics; (2) a systematic method is built to extract and screen technological components from SAOs; and (3) we propose a “relevance indicator” to calculate the relevance of the technological components to requirements, and finally identify core technological components based on this indicator. An empirical study of graphene is performed to demonstrate the proposed method. The resulting knowledge may hold interest for R&D management and corporate technology strategies in practice.